Lipstick Traces (Click to hear it)

When I imagine how my parents met
in a Montréal bar, on a Wednesday in 1967,
I worry that it might not have happened-
that they might have turned from each other
to unconsummate me.

Nonexistence begins when
my father walks to the restroom,
his stylish lambchops blinkering his sight,
and my mother drops something on the floor,
lipstick perhaps. They never make eye contact,
and I am blinded,
unloved.

But when I go back further,
beyond the dating of my grandparents,
and I salmon-swim through the current
of centuries, I see a school of unknown
relatives that had to love and lust,
without deviation, for me to exist as I do.

Beginning with two apes that rutted in a forest,
dead generations whisper in our blood vessels,
just like a chance meeting between my wife and me
will someday hide in the tissue of a great-
great-grandchild. Our delicate love
echoes with the shaking beds of history.

The closed door yell of orgasm
and birth, century after century,
brought my son umbilicalled into this world
and somewhere, somewhere unknown,
a girl has been born who will look
at our boy with honeyed eyes, or-

just as likely-
she will drop her lipstick,
and never know that
he existed.

Not Springing Forward in Barcelona (Click to hear it)

In a time-zone all our own,
we were a bubble of the past,
a cleanser upon the last sentence of history.
Lazing through tangled medieval lanes
we offered everyone a do-over, a mulligan,
and as time flowed backwards to greet us
we imagined the world transformed-

gashes were healed by knives,
seatbelts were remembered,
nets of salmon effervesced the ocean,
bombs rebuilt cities, swallowed firestorms.
M16s sucked bullets from the resurrected,
disease brought health, everyone got younger,
showers lifted poison from innocent lungs,
refugees returned home to their flats,
their huts, their wigwams, and
here, in the port of Barcelona,
galleons ballasted with gold
set a course for the Aztecs.
They returned with unused blankets.
In our little mythology,
history was not to be feared.
We listened to the metronome
of the Mediterranean, waved to Odysseus,
the clockwork of a spoon in coffee
held the timing of a galaxy.
Long before the moon cut a calendar
or the sun shadowed the rhythms of sleep,
we watched an apple fall up, into a tree-
two famous lovers strolled along,
their wrists as naked as ours.

Spelling Lesson (Click to hear it)

When I first learned to spell my name,
I imagined that the letters had stories-
a horseshoe on a stick made up the P,
a tent with a crossbar made up the A,
and a headless crucifix finished off the T.

U was my favourite because it had so many stories-
it was a magnet, a jump-rope, a snake,
a falling rollercoaster, a thimble, a giant toe.
Letters were made of stories,
not the other way around.

“Spell ‘color’,” Sister Catherine asked.

The stories came quickly. “C-o-l-o-u-r, colour.”

The cave of her mouth opened to say “no”- a perfect O,
it reminded me of a hole, a coin, a wheel, a planet.

My mother, from Belfast, had taught me to read
the children’s stories she knew so that I might get ahead.
Clive and Honoria explored castles and went fox-hunting.
They had tea at four, jamcakes, holidays in the Lake District.
I read book after book about them. They were my friends.
They were good students, and they knew how to spell.

“Spell color,” Sister Catherine commanded. “And this time,
spell it like an American.”

“C-o-l-o…r.”

And so, I passed her class-
the blood in my brain
was purged forward.